Today in Cold War History
1947 – The State of Prussia ceases to exist.
1948 – The Communist Party takes control of government in Czechoslovakia and the period of the Third Republic ends.
1954 – Gamal Abdel Nasser is made premier of Egypt.
1956 – In his speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union denounces the cult of personality of Joseph Stalin. The speech was a milestone in the “Khrushchev Thaw.” Superficially, the speech was an attempt to draw the Soviet Communist Party closer to Leninism. Khrushchev’s ulterior motivation, however, was to legitimize and help consolidate his control of the Communist party and government, power obtained in a political struggle with Stalin loyalists Vyacheslav Molotov and Georgy Malenkov.
The Khrushchev report was known as the “Secret Speech” because it was delivered at an unpublicized closed session of Communist Party delegates, with guests and members of the press excluded. Although the text of the Khrushchev report leaked almost immediately, the official Russian text was published only in 1989 during the glasnost campaign of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
1964 – North Korean Prime Minister Kim Il-sung calls for the removal of feudalistic land ownership aimed at turning all cooperative farms into state-run ones.
1964 – U.S. Air Force launches a satellite employing a US Air Force Atlas/Agena combination from Point Arguello (LC-2-3) in California and from Cape Kennedy in Florida.
1968 – Vietnam War: 135 unarmed citizens of Hà My village in South Vietnam’s Quảng Nam Province are killed and buried en masse by South Korean troops in what would come to be known as the Hà My massacre.
1971 – The first unit of the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, the first commercial nuclear power station in Canada, goes online.
1980 – The government of Suriname is overthrown by a military coup which is initiated by the bombing of the police station from an army ship off the coast of the nation’s capital, Paramaribo
1986 – People Power Revolution: President of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos flees the nation after 20 years of rule; Corazon Aquino becomes the Philippines’ first woman president.
1991 – Gulf War: An Iraqi scud missile hits an American military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia killing 28 U.S. Army Reservists from Pennsylvania.
1991 – The Warsaw Pact is declared disbanded.